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Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

Why another Dichterliebe recording? Because Gerald Finley has simply one of the greatest voices of his generation, and is an artist at the peak of his powers. He brings to this noble cycle the supreme musical understanding that characterizes all his ...» More

'Hyperion’s Schumann series continues to strike gold with a collection … that finds baritone Christopher Maltman on superb form … with this ...'This is a treasurable issue – generous in quality and quantity alike. As with the Hyperion Schubert Song edition one struggles for new ways of expres ...» More

Heine’s and Schumann’s enthusiasm for Napoleon has already been discussed in the Introduction. In 1816, at the age of nineteen, Heine had seen the straggling remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée pass through Düsseldorf as repatriated prisoners of war. Schumann had had the same experience as a six-year-old in Zwickau. The Russians were officially Germany’s allies, but many Europeans who had been conquered by Napoleon saw these pathetic survivors as the heroic victims of barbarians. The returning French soldiers had endured years of unimaginable hardship since 1812; released after Napoleon’s first defeat and imprisonment on Elba, they began their long route march home as the Congress of Vienna met to divide the European spoils in 1814. During their endless journey on foot the encouraging news had almost certainly filtered through to them that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and had once again challenged the might of his assembled enemies. At least some of these soldiers might have thought that they would soon be part of a victorious army once again, but Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo dashed all these hopes. Heine imagines his two protagonists stumbling on to German soil after the vast march across eastern Europe and hearing the news of Napoleon’s rout for the first time. The modern reader is reminded of Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific islands in the 1950s who were apparently unaware that their Emperor had surrendered long ago.

Everything is set up for a scène of the greatest pathos, also excited by the poem’s dramatic potential. At exactly the same time, and unbeknown to Schumann, Richard Wagner chose to set Heine’s French version of this lyric. It is one of the most curious coincidences in musical history that both composers should have chosen to incorporate La Marseillaise at the song’s climactic point – although it may be that anyone setting these words would have had to quote this famous tune. As a result of this, Wagner changed the dedication of his song at the last minute from Heine to Schumann. This was in fact the second time that Schumann had quoted the French national anthem. On visiting Vienna in 1839 he was surprised to discover that it was an illegal piece of music in Metternich’s Austria. He therefore took special delight in concealing it in the first movement (Allegro) of his Faschingsschwank aus Wien for solo piano where the outline of La Marseillaise (in 3/4 time!) appears in bars 299 to 306.

1. The two-bar introduction is a masterly encapsulation of military pride undermined by exhaustion, a fanfare for a once-great army adapted to the present sad circumstances of its demise. The first thing we hear is a proud gesture, a chord in the tonic minor (an upbeat to the opening bar) which stretches defiantly, and somewhat creakily, up the octave, arriving on the first beat (a reiteration of the tonic) with the precision of an old soldier’s salute. Then there is another military motif – three beats in dotted rhythm which shuffle rather than march. This is followed by a despondent run of four semiquavers falling away into the bass. Eric Sams hears ‘a sad bugle, a dull drum, two paces apart; defeated soldiers’. There is still the ghost of a military procession in this music, but the triplets in the vocal line (at ‘zogen zwei Grenadier’’) pull against the crisp dotted rhythm of drum-taps in the piano – a suggestion of a limp. Under ‘die waren in Russland gefangen’ left-hand octaves plunge ever deeper into the bass clef doubling the falling vocal line, a commentary on the depth of the soldiers’ despair, but still stoic and brave. After ‘sie kamen ins deutsche Quartier’ (set to shuffling triplets once again) we hear those defeated descending semiquavers again. The same music which had described their being taken prisoner in Russia is repeated to describe heads hanging in shame. Despite these intimations of defeat the broad sweep of the music is stirring and defiant.

2. The raising of a semitone in the vocal line (E to F at ‘Da hörten sie beide die traurige Mär’) is another gestural touch, as if a head raised incredulously with the arrival of bad tidings, or ears straining for the latest news. The accompaniment is in simple minims, drained of activity as if to reflect the hopelessness of the soldiers’ position. This music is in Schumann’s ballad style where the singer is given expressive leeway by unfussy piano writing. The vocal line which describes the defeat of France (‘dass Frankreich verloren gegangen’) droops downward in despondent fashion; but the third and fourth lines of this strophe reverse direction and climb upwards in ascending sequences of fourths and thirds. As insult is added to injury, the music reflects the soldiers’ outrage that the emperor, the emperor himself (the repeat of ‘der Kaiser’ is Heine’s) has been taken prisoner. The interlude following this (the same two-bar motif that has served as the introduction) seems to be injected with new energy as a result of their angry disbelief.

3, 4. This section begins with what seems to be a recapitulation of the music of the opening but this soon leads to a new conversational exchange. The depiction of two characters needs careful management on the part of the singer, but Schumann brilliantly suggests the two men’s different views of where their duty lies at the same time as retaining the song’s unity. Once again the accompaniment is reduced to phlegmatic minims which encourage the singer to greater rhythmic freedom. After the first grenadier says ‘Wie weh’ wird mir, / Wie brennt meine alte Wunde!’ the second one replies in a sequence a tone lower (‘Das Lied ist aus / Auch ich möcht’ mit dir sterben’). The effect of this juxtaposition is to make the first soldier sound strong, with a fighting spirit, and the second weaker and resigned; the latter’s vocal line pivots around a wailing motif (‘Doch hab’ ich Weib und Kind zu Haus’) made up of a rising diminished fifth and falling major third which seems a perfect tonal analogue for the apologetic wringing of hands.

5, 6. For the first time the opening motif is sung in tighter rhythm (‘Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind’) with the formerly shuffling triplets banished. With this spring in the step of the music we sense that the first soldier, with tremendous effort, has pulled himself up to his full height. Such considerations as wife and child are swept aside. Heine may have been inspired by the similar sentiments of Edward (in the Scottish ballad of the same name translated by Herder from Percy’s Reliques and set to music by both Schubert and Loewe). That poem contains the lines ‘lass sie betteln drin’ – remarkably similar to Heine’s ‘lass sie betteln gehn’. As the fanatical admirer of Napoleon warms to his theme (verse 6) the accompaniment blossoms into triplets and the tempo marking is ‘Nach und nach bewegter’. This almost disguises the fact that Schumann has created no new material for this outburst (‘Gewähr’, mir Bruder, eine Bitt’’); instead he relies on the melodic shape of verse 2 in a slightly modified version where stirring triplets and an exciting accelerando breathe new life into this material. One can only admire the composer’s use of his musical resources to make a song which is both histrionically effective and musically economical.

7. Eric Sams has pointed out that the song has been full of dominant chords which shift rather feebly to the tonic, leaving a sense of unresolved tension, a feeling that there is a powder-keg in this song that is due to explode. And this is so: everything is planned to lead to the coup de grâce, the appearance of the Marseillaise in the tonic major. From ‘Das Ehrenkreuz am roten Band’ the music is marked ‘Schneller’. Here an entire strophe of Heine’s text is given over to what is in effect a dominant pedal. A rising tide of left-hand crotchets is complemented by throbbing off-beat quavers in the right; it is true that the harmony passes briefly through the tonic on the third beat of seven bars in succession, but the repeated plunge back to the dominant winds up the tension to fever pitch. Hairpin dynamics ensure that crescendi alternate with sudden returns to piano. It is as if the dying soldier were gasping for breath every two bars as ever more fervently he instructs his comrade how his corpse, armed and at the ready, should be buried in French earth.

8. Something has to give in the harmony, and the triumphant and explosive appearance of the French national anthem comes at exactly the right time for the music, if not exactly for the poem. Wagner reserves his quotation of the Marseillaise (initially a solo piano interlude) for later in the verse. But Schumann has the grenadier begin his rendition of the famous tune with the singularly inappropriate words ‘So will ich liegen und horchen still’. The effect is unintentionally ironic; there is no way that any singer can do justice to the idea of lying still in the grave given the contradictory message of this stirring tune. But Schumann’s setting survives this anomaly and the listener is swept away by the blazing conviction of the music. The accompaniment in the major key at last transforms the falling semiquaver motif into martial use as the piano hammers out its triumphant support; at ‘Viel Schwerter klirren und blitzen’ the accompaniment doubles the voice in blistering double octaves.

But there is one further surprise. Wagner ends his song in a blazing fortissimo, but this is not how Schumann has envisaged the end of the story. In this way he seems more interested in dramatic truth than Wagner whose song here reveals itself as something of a potboiler. This is not to say that Schumann’s solution is ideal. In Der Soldat (Op 40 No 3) the execution of a soldier is followed by a postlude which can seem a gigantic anticlimax to the overpowering drama of the song. In the same way the final bars of this song describes another soldier’s death in pianistic terms where the compassion of the observer (in this case the composer) is more important than the mood of deluded jingoism in which the grenadier ends his life. It is as if Schumann, now the family man, is showing us that his wife and child do matter after all. But the trouble is that this ending can seem all too easily bathetic. Performers have to work very hard indeed to make something convincing of these concluding bars which are full of emotion contained within very slender musical means.

Another great song comes to mind, and there is no doubt that Heine knew the Wilhelm Müller poem in question, and that Schumann knew the music. I am thinking of Trockne Blumen from Die schöne Müllerin. Here we find a similar aggressive and unhinged fantasy concerning resurrection from the grave, a similar transformation of minor-key music into major-key triumphalism (the climactic processional in this song – ‘Der Mai ist kommen / Der Winter ist aus’ – is almost as stirring as La Marseillaise) and a similar minor-key postlude which returns the martial mood of the music to the realms of crestfallen impotence.

After Die Minnesänger, here is another tale with a trompe l’œil medieval background. To a certain extent Schumann follows suit with a trompe l’oreille piece of music – written in his ballad style with that simplified musical vocabulary which, with more optimism than musicological proof, he took to be suggestive of old minstrelsy (Blondels Lied in Volume 3 is another example). Heine has a taste for including legends in his work, the Lorelei and The Flying Dutchman chief among them, but it would be interesting to know whether he had a source for this ghostly tale, or whether it was sheer invention on his part. The poem was titled Zwei Brüder in the Buch der Lieder, but it had been titled simply Die Brüder (‘The Brothers’) in the Gedichte of 1822. Interestingly enough ‘The Brothers’ is also the name of two castles near Boppard on the Rhine – Liebenstein and Sterrenberg. In the poet’s own family history there was a certain amount of discord between his father, the unsuccessful salesman Samson Heine, and Salomon Heine, the detested rich uncle, father of the cousin with whom the young poet was hopelessly enamoured. In any case German legend and fairytale contains various examples of brothers, or at least chums, who went their different ways and whose fates were held up to the reader as examples of industry rewarded, or laziness punished.

1 – 2. In its downward sweep, the single bar of introduction is somehow reminiscent of the second In der Fremde song from the Eichendorff Liederkreis. It suggests a glance which takes in an entire vista from a high vantage point (in this case the castle) and quickly shifts focus from the general to the particular. In this case the fight takes place in the valley below the castle, and in the opening bar the composer directs our gaze in that direction. The shape of the vocal line recalls that of Belsatzar (the same rising fourth at the opening and a continuing melodic similarity) and closer study reveals several thematic affinities with that work. A strong bass line in accented striding minims underpins the majority of the song; this serves to suggest masculine strength. Schumann somehow finds exactly the right pace to suggest the shifting stance of duellists – each left-hand minim seems to betoken a new series of thrusts and parries from a different position. The glint of the flashing of sparks of steel blades as they clash one against the other is painted by staccato quavers in the right hand. In the second verse the vocal line descends from the top of the stave for the first two lines, and then ascends it again for the third and the fourth. This suggests ceaseless fighting up hill and down dale (or, in this case, down dale and up hill).

3 – 4. In the most economic way possible, Heine explains the origins of the conflict. Schumann cleverly contrives a musical change of scene into the relative major. The courtly accompaniment in this section devoted to the beautiful Countess Laura is in thirds, sixths and tenths. Eric Sams points out that in Schumann’s songs such writing implies ‘the idea of comradeship or togetherness’ (cf. that song about two comrades whose lives go in different directions, the Eichendorff setting Frühlingsfahrt – Volume 4). The idea of a woman simultaneously loved by two men is the reason for this unusually euphonious music. But there is also strain in this old-fashioned gavotte. The vocal line is shadowed possessively by this accompaniment, well behaved for the moment but almost artificially polite. We have a sense of not one, but two, pairs of eyes never allowing the object of their attention to slip from their sight. At the end of verse 4 all pretence of collaboration is abandoned; at ‘Schwert heraus, entscheide du!’ it is back to brutal unisons and the deciding power of force.

5 – 6. The music for these two strophes is a repetition of strophes 1 and 2 with an important difference. The brothers continue to fight, but this time death is the outcome for them both, impaled on each others’ steel. And this despite a warning from the poet (‘Hütet euch, ihr wilden Degen’), as if he was the appalled observer of the fight, urging caution as he does so. Cries of ‘Wehe! Wehe! Blut’ge Brüder’ place the narrator in the forefront of the action. Schumann emphasises the tragedy of the outcome by repeating lines 3 and 4 of strophe 6 (‘Beide Kämpfer stürzen nieder, / Einer in des andern Stahl’). A new twist, or rather slump, in the harmony at ‘stürzen nieder’ adds to the pathos of the picture and changes the direction of the music. For the first time in the song there is a piano interlude of two bars which paves the way for the supernatural peroration.

7 – 8. This is a straightforward repetition of the music for strophes 1 and 2 from the point of view of the vocal line. But the mood of the music is completely altered by a new accompaniment and a piano dynamic. There is no change of tempo, but instead of a glinting staccato sword-fight we have muffled quavers alternating breathlessly between the hands. We are now seeing and hearing the two brothers fighting as ghosts, caught in a time-warp of having to repeat their battle forever. These quaver pulsations are underpinned by tolling minims – no longer accented and masculine, but etiolated and hazy, a metaphor for the passing of time, or perhaps meant to suggest the distant striking of the midnight bell which is a signal for battle to commence. The accompaniment of this section is reminiscent of the closing pages of a Heine setting that had been composed earlier in 1840 – and also in the original key of B minor: Mit Myrten und Rosen from Op 24. The two brothers are fighting over the ghost of love, and in Myrten und Rosen the poet mentions ‘der Liebe Geist’ (‘the spirit of love’) and sad magic spells that will one day be broken. We are thus reminded that it is only love that can redeem the brothers’ conflict and lay them to rest. It is quite an achievement on the composer’s part to make something so lyrical and poetic from the closing of a work as hearty and populist as this. The suddenly four-bar postlude (back to the forte accompanying style of the opening) finishes the song in dramatic fashion; we are reminded that the aim of such ballads is not to encourage introspection but to bring audiences to their feet. This stirring flourish makes an enthusiastic reception for the song a little more likely.

Why this poem appealed to the composer in April of 1840 is not hard to imagine. He was always tormented by the possibility that another man would steal away his Clara from under his nose before he had the opportunity to make her his bride. There is no doubt that Schumann, in his own mind at least, would have been determined to fight a duel to the finish for her if that had proved necessary.

This is one of the Schumann songs that one very seldom hears in the concert hall. It is difficult to see the composer’s point in appending it for publication to the two utterly different settings of Op 49—the celebrated Die beiden Grenadiere and the rumbustious Die feindlichen Brüder. These Heine songs (and Fröhlich was no match for Heine) were composed some six months earlier. Die Nonne is therefore something of an orphan, left standing alone and abandoned in very much the same way as the nun who is the subject matter of the poem. Schumann here adopts the style of church music—although nothing nearly as grand as in Stirb’ Lieb’ und Freud’ for which Die Nonne, written a few days earlier than the Kerner masterpiece, seems something of a preparatory study. Eric Sams has pointed out melodic similarities between these two songs, as well as tracing a thematic link to that other great wedding song from Dichterliebe, Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen.

Although Schumann was already safely married when writing this song, the story of his battle for Clara’s hand had included his fear that something could go wrong with his wedding, even at the last minute. He seems to have been almost morbidly drawn to stories of nuptial celebrations where the sounds of marital rejoicing cause the narrator’s heartbreak. It is by no means clear in this poem whether the wedding that the nun hears over the way is that of a man she still loves, but it was no doubt a scenario that ran through the composer’s mind.

The key is D flat major, the tempo marking Andante with an introduction that suggests organ music in a small chapel, pensively hymn-like (rather than the florid baroque improvisations appropriate to Augsburg cathedral in Stirb’ Lieb’ und Freud’). The music for the poem’s first verse with its sliding chromatic descents suggests self-abnegating piety. The second verse (with an abrupt change to E major) describes the singing and dancing of a wedding; the heavy-handed staccato chords create an impression of a crude intrusion into a rarefied world of contemplation. This is clearly masculine music; for the third verse a return to D flat major and the calm crotchets of the opening re-establishes femininity as the bride comes to the window for a breath of fresh air. The nun glimpses her and begins to weep. It is the music for the last strophe that lifts the song into a loftier realm. In this key of D flat major, and with a sequence of modulations that ventures into the sharp keys, it recalls no other music more strongly than the famous postlude to Dichterliebe, although without that music’s miraculous sense of resolution. In the setting of these words the tragedy of the self-pitying nun’s fate is emphasized by the composer; the music ends in a way that leaves her fate dangling, but to Schumann’s credit it also incorporates a sense of the self-examination and spiritual struggle that has brought her to this point in her life—and the bitterness of the closing bars tells us that this spiritual journey has been all in vain.

It is a mystery where Schumann found this poem; there is one known printing and that is in the poet’s complete works of 1853. This is the only poem that Schumann set by Abraham Fröhlich, someone whose work is far outside the usual range of Schumann’s literary interest. It is the subject matter alone of the poem that interested him. The poet was born in Brugg in the Swiss canton of Aargau. Whilst remaining a religious writer by conviction, Fröhlich was also a famous satirist, a kind of modern-day La Fontaine. His Hundert neue Fabeln (1825) is his most famous work.